A place for a tired old woman to try to figure things out so that the world makes a bit of sense.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Coordinated Attacks

Before I had even had my first cup of (unleaded) coffee, I read an email from Woody Guthrie's Guitar about a post he has up at Walled-In-Pond on a sneak attack on abortion rights in Missouri. He cites a TruthOut article:

TruthOut.Org has the following: The Missouri Lege is ready to pass and to send on to Gov. Blunt--who has already pledged to sign it--a bill which would impose regulatory language on Mo. abortion clinics that would effectively drive existing abortion providers out of business, and prevent new ones from being established. It would also restrict 'sex education' in schools to programs dominated by the 'abstinence-only' stance. ...

What this illustrates most compellingly is that, when human rights are taken off the national table and relegated to the far less carefully scrutinized Leges in the States, human rights are far more vulnerable to challenge, if not out-right revocation, by the prejudices of the 'majority.'

Woody was wrong only insofar as he implies that the anti-abortion, anti-woman folks have decided to concentrate only on state legislatures. An article in today's NY Times makes it clear that abortion foes are making a concerted effort in every possible forum they can find, from the US Supreme Court on down.

For many years, the political struggle over abortion was often framed as a starkly binary choice: the interest of the woman, advocated by supporters of abortion rights, versus the interest of the fetus, advocated by opponents of abortion.

But last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion leaders, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country. They say that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the same. [Emphasis added]

In other words, women aren't capable of knowing what's best for them. Men have to step in and take care of all of these messy little problems so that the girls don't have to worry their beautiful little heads about such complicated matters.